A Simple Halloween Tradition

Head's up || Sponsored by Samsung Home Appliances

Lately I've been feeling the speed of time. It's not something I want to feel - this race towards what's next, but often times it's hard not to feel it. Summer time was an immersive time - spending twenty five nights camped out all five of us together and fall is different.

We live in Ottawa where fall is a mere whisper and winter lasts for half a year - so the season always feels a little too brief. So I admittedly don't settle into fall, or look forward to it like so many seem to (I assume their winters are slightly less intense than ours). So in these days of competitive dance practice, and brownies and obstacle course relay gyms it's nice to have an excuse to slow down and have a little fun. This is one reason why we love to have a little early Halloween celebration before actual Halloween night.

Halloween for me always pulls in so much nostalgia of getting ready in my parents' dated bathroom, my Dad applying a masterpiece of face-paint. The monster mash tunes that we'd play on our front porch from the cassette player plugged into the wall. The mandatory pictures by mom Mom (I'll take a tripod and a timer over anyone taking my picture please and thank you). But most of all I remember the trick-or-treating. Because that's what counts right? The candy! So actual Halloween night is generally a blur of costume getting on, dinner scarfing down and then candy, candy, candy.

So before actual Halloween night arrives we make a Halloween treat and spend the next few days chasing it down with milk (and wine).

This year we opted for brownies. I bought googly eye candy, white icing and two packages of brownie mix (hey I never promised anything from scratch over here... ). The girls added in a package of cookies and then they were off.

A huge advantage to having eight year old twins, they can almost whip up these brownies on their own.

Here is what you need to make Halloween Brownies:

• 2 Packages Betty Crocker Chocolate Chunk Brownie Mix (So they could each make their own)
• 2 Containers Betty Crocker Fluffy White Icing
• 2 Small Ziplock Bags
• 1 Package Googly Eye Candies
• 1 Box of Girl Guide Cookies

Directions for Halloween Brownies:

1. Prepare the brownies as per the package instructions and then allow to cool completely (Suggestion: send your kids out on a fall decor backyard search while they wait - or throw on The Nightmare Before Christmas (because that is totally a Halloween movie)).
2. Cut the cooled brownies into squares / rectangles.
3. Cut the cookies in half.
4. Next, allow your children creative direction over the design because this is supposed to be fun, not perfect.
5. Alice and Isla each filled a ziplock with icing and then cut a tiny hole at one end. They used this set-up to pipe on the icing to the brownies.
6. Alternate between spider webs, mummies with eyes and bats with halves of cookies for wings.
7. Take pictures, and then eat!

Bonus Points:

Suggest you all throw on your Halloween costumes to eat the treats in after the clean up is done.

Our clean up was super easy because we just throw everything in the dishwasher.

Side note - did you know that we went a whole eight months without a dishwasher last year?? (Spoiler alert: we almost lost our minds). And while I realize I am really here to talk about our little Halloween tradition, I feel like a little dose of honesty feels right - so here goes. We were on dishwasher number one for this house but number three for us and we were scared. We lived through a basement flooding at our old house from a dishwasher and then a pricey lemon at this house.

So this time around we decided to try a new to us company, Samsung. We read the reviews and picked out a model and one year later, we are still happy with our decision. We run our dishwasher at least once a day and it makes the cleanup no big deal.

I also love to subtly style our home for fall and halloween. Cue all the white pumpkins, changing leaves and lit candles. (Not to mention the hidden boxes of halloween candy).

My favourite place to buy decorations is the grocery store for pumpkins and gourds and the dollar store for a couple fun touches... Like the spiders you'll see next. We do have a two year old in the house so we don't want anything too scary!

And while we don't exactly have a costume planned for our four legged friend Sonata, I will tell you that Andrew and I both dress up on Halloween night and I highly recommend you do too! Andrew is known as the neighbourhood penguin (I'm not even kidding, we live in a small town and a couple of people have referred to him as such), and I alternate between a witch and a care bear.

So tell me, do you have any Halloween traditions and when was the last time you dressed up?

This post was written for Samsung Home Appliances.